David Gillett's post (clipped)

<<<<However, another option may be to buy or borrow a USB floppy drive to boot 
rom with the CD drive in place, at least long enough to install the OS and 
drivers>>>

it appears that the dell latitude CPi floppy drive can be used as an external device also. the following dell URL has the details and also a pic. of the connection when you click on "used as an external device"

 http://tinyurl.com/qccw3

I would suggest

(1) you connect your floppy drive externally/ start your laptop/ enter bios and set boot sequence from floppy diskette first/ save bios change and exit.

(2)insert the boot disk and choose boot WITHOUT cdrom support and then shut down the laptop.

(3) reboot the laptop/enter bios immediately change boot sequence to boot from CDROM first, remove the boot disk, insert the win98se cd in the cdrom drive, save bios changes and exit.

(4)now again shut down and reboot with cdrom in the drive and HOPEFULLY you should be able to enter setup.

since you confirm that the cdrom drive is in working condition i assume that the necessary drivers are installed and so i can think of only "the swappable storage drive" feature of the laptop which is prventing detection of you cdrom drive by the boot disk. I will be glad to learn if there are some other reasons. 

HTH and good luck----Venkat

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